


Everyone Needs Hugs Sometimes, Right?

by Flora (florahart)



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Clint isn't quite okay, Cuddling, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Thor's nightmares mean lightning, off-screen Steve/Coulson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-20
Updated: 2012-09-20
Packaged: 2017-11-14 15:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/pseuds/Flora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times an Avenger woke up in Steve's arms, and one time he woke up in all of theirs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everyone Needs Hugs Sometimes, Right?

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt [at the kinkmeme](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/10266.html?thread=22526746#t22526746), edited and expanded somewhat here. There is implied--barely--Steve/Coulson.

1\. The trouble with this group is that there keep being unexpected problems. Their _expected_ problems are bad enough; they got a guy whose heart, per Steve's understanding, is allowed to keep running by means of a giant magnet that tried to--this part is quoting Tony--poison his ass to death, and another guy who occasionally doubles his bulk, turns green, and stomps things. So, you know, it's not your average roommate situation on a good day.

Tonight's new problem, as described by Clint in a slight panic when he bangs on Steve's door: Thor evidently _tosses fucking lightning off his body_ when he's having a nightmare. Steve is still busy adjusting to Thor as a concept. That is, he accepts him as a teammate and a friend and even a housemate, but gods from other planets are contrary to his upbringing. So the lightning thing throws him for a little bit of a loop.

Because okay, for one thing, gods have nightmares? But more importantly, so far he's zapped the ever-loving shit out of Bruce, who opted to leave the vicinity because that was never going to end well; sliced through the wall that houses one of the primary chunks of JARVIS's audio-control circuitry, which, that's not critical because Tony is a fan of redundancy in his _practically-alive computers_ (also a continuing challenge for Steve, who feels he is doing very well in his adjustment, thank you) so everything still works so far but it seems it came _this close_ to wiping out south side elevator control and that's how Tasha gets directly from her suite to the communal kitchen with the big ovens and that _would not do_ ; and sliced clean through Clint's favorite bow from his teenage years, which Tony promises he can make good as new but Steve can tell Clint is definitely not buying that.

All in all, they really need to calm him down, and it seems like it's going to have to be Steve that charges into the fray because anyone else that is still present would probably die of lightning. Except Tony, if he put on the suit, but Steve doesn't want to wait for that and also doesn't like the notion of giving Tony's already-distressed heart more shocks than it needs.

Onward, then. The wall is sliced through but not opened up big enough to get in in several places, and Tony doesn't want to tear out more conduit if it dosn't have to so he overrides the door control from his lab (JARVIS says it's done, maybe; his voice is a little hinky while they reroute) and Steve yanks it open and goes in. "Thor? Big guy?" He's pretty sure if Thor's out cold enough to be flinging lightning unawares he probably won't wake up from a simple holler, but he doesn't like it when people sneak up on him, so he wants to be respectful.

But of course, Thor can't hear him. He's sprawled wide on his big bed, current crawling on his chest and thighs as he mumbles and thrashes, and Steve sighs, pokes him gently with one finger (ow!) and then considers guys he knew in another lifetime, seeing impossible things in their dreams and always feeling so very unsafe, and crawls into the bed with him, bringing his arm across so he can fold him into a hug.

A hug that is pretty much torching his clothes, so that's probably going to be embarrassing when his whole front is exposed and also _ow_ , he should have put on silicon underwear or something before coming in here--would have, if it had occurred to him, but Thor isn't burning the _bed_ clothes, so how was he going to know? "Thor?" he tries again. "Hey, can you wake up?" He rocks him gently and mutters soothing sounds, and after a minute the crackling slows and slops, and Thor opens his eyes. "Hey, you okay?"

"I was..." Thor frowns. "I was dreaming of a particularly angry fight," he says. He looks around. "What has happened?"

"You had a nightmare, I guess," Steve says. "You must have been calling lightning in your dream? So you did outside your dream, too."

Thor lifts his head to look at one wall, then another. "Did not Mjolnir absorb the power?" He looks over the side of the bed at the hammer, lying on the floor where it usually does when he sleeps. "This has not happened since I was a child, a young boy."

Steve nods. "Well, sometimes the dreams get the best of us," he says. He suspects, but isn't certain, that their most recent run-in with Loki has left Thor more unsettled than he'll admit. "So, um. I think the usual cure for nightmares is warm milk and cookies."

"Is it? Has this worked for you?"

"Don't know. When I was a kid, we didn't have--well, that doesn't matter. Come on. Everyone will want to know you're all right." Steve lets go of Thor and rolls away and to his feet, looking down at his very pink, very warm bare skin all the way to his thighs. "Uh, you got a blanket I can borrow?"

* * *

2\. "Tasha? Tasha? Can you hear me?" Steve tosses a couple more chunks of concrete away and at last-- _finally_ \--spots a flash of gray-dusted pale flesh smeared with dirty blood. He touches the... arm, maybe? elbow? carefully and sighs with relief: it's warm and doesn't have the horrible stillness he feared. "Think I found her," he says into his comm. "She's not responding. I could use a little help digging."

He goes back to moving concrete, more carefully now that he's close and any individual shift is more likely to crush her worse, until he has her left arm and most of her torso exposed under an overhanging ledge. "Tasha? Can you wake up?"

She groans, low and quiet as though even unconscious her training forces her to opt against giving away her position.

"Good girl, come on." Steve nods as Clint and Thor show up to help him shift the rest of the rubble. Tony flies overhead and his voice comes in, assessing the stability of the structure. "Hey, Cap, I'm going to see if I can't just knock some of this mess away. You want to cover her just in case?"

"Tony, be--" Steve looks up to see a repulsor blast into the concrete, and he shakes his head and crawls in over her. "--careful," he mutters.

"Building's unstable," she mutters against his throat. 

"Yeah, we noticed," he says back, quiet. "Hold still, Tony's working on some of the bigger pieces." A roar shakes them and he adds, "Um, and maybe Bruce is helping." The ground under them shifts a little, which is disconcerting, but it stops and nothing bad happens, so Steve glances up and lifts himself away enough to look at her. "How ya feel?" he asks.

"Like a building fell on me," she says. She pauses, her face tense with concentration, then says, "I believe my right ankle is broken. My knees don't feel right, either, but I do not believe I am losing a significant amount of blood."

"Good," he says. "Because I really didn't want to dig you out just so you could bleed to death in my arms."

"Aw. Such sentiment," she says.

He returns her grin and waits for Hulk and Thor to lift away the rest of the wall.

* * *

3\. "Whahappen?" Clint asks, lifting his head off Steve's shoulder.

Steve keeps walking. "You accepted a challenge," he says. He jostles Clint a little as they get into the elevator, pressing his feet against the wall while he pushes a button for Clint's floor.

Clint's head falls back into place, cheek against Steve's collarbone, breathing against his throat. "Kin'a challgg?"

"The kind with a lot of drinking followed by a lot of smashed furniture in a bar," Steve says. He tries to keep his tone neutral, because he does get the need to blow off steam and it's not like he never went looking for a fight he couldn't win, but he doesn't like that Clint keeps getting into these scrapes every few weeks, nor that it's happened way more often lately. He's not sure whether Fury or Coulson know about them, and is starting to think maybe he should say something. "They found my number in your pocket again."

"Time'sit?"

JARVIS's voice (repaired after the Great Lightning Incident) comes over the speaker. "It is two seventeen a.m., Master Clint."

"Kay. Hey Steve?"

"Yeah?"

"You c'n prob'ly put me down."

Steve figures that's going to end with Clint in a heap on the floor, but he doesn't want to treat him like a child, so he says, "You want to walk yourself?"

"Mmm-hm."

"You got it." He sets Clint's feet down and keeps a hand on him to make sure he doesn't hit his head.

"I gotta stop doin' this," Clint says.

"Yep." 

"Comin' up on a year."

Steve thinks back and realizes yes, the anniversary of Loki's assault on Clint --and the rest of them, but that was way less personal-- is in a few days. Which does explain the sudden increase in frequency and which also means he's dropped the ball badly not to recognize that on his own. Damn it. "Sorry. I mean, I didn't--sorry."

"You tell Coulson I'm a li'bility?" Clint looks at him blurrily.

"Not yet."

Clint nods and sways. "Come with me?"

"What, to your room?"

"T'talk t' Coulson. I gotta tell 'im I gotta see a fuckin' counselor."

Steve raises his eyebrows. "Yeah, I'll come with. Of course I'll come with."

"Thanks."

* * *

4\. "You know what would have been way more fun than this?" Steve asks. His head is throbbing and he's pretty sure even with the healing factor his bruises have pet bruises and a bruise picket fence, and Bruce is rolling away from him, squinting because he always squints when he comes back to Bruce, like his eyes see differently from Hulk's. Which, probably they do.

"What's that?"

" _Not_ being landed on by Hulk." Steve sits up, rolling his shoulders and trying to figure out if there's anything he actually needs to report as an injury. "Seriously, that _sucked_."

"Sorry." Bruce scratches at his face. "He's--not that I actually speak for him, obviously? But I think he's really distracted lately."

"How come?"

"Clint."

Steve nods and pushes up to standing and looks around at the Hulk-shaped crater with a Steve-shaped dent in the middle of it, in which he's standing. "He'll be back in shape soon enough."

" _I_ know that. The other guy feels, I don't know, deserted?" Bruce shrugs. "I don't get it either. I don't think they're best friends and it's not like we've never had someone off duty for injury before, but it feels like he counts us and comes up short and doesn't understand why. And then..." He holds out his hands. "Maybe you should explain it to him, if he shows up again?"

Steve shrugs. "If he shows up again before Clint's cleared for duty, I'll try. If there's time." He arches his back, hands propped low behind his waist until something pops. "But maybe it won't come up. I hope it won't, because he says he's doing well." He holds out a pair of flimsy shorts fished out of a pocket. 

Bruce nods and takes the pants. "Me, too."

* * *

5\. "This may be the biggest cliché I have ever experienced," Tony says, because when he wakes up he starts talking almost before he starts breathing. His back is pressed up against Steve's front, and it's finally getting to a temperature a reasonable person would call warm. "I mean, it would be more of one if we were naked, of course, but still. Shared body heat. It's like the first thing on the convenient porn checklist."

"We weren't wet, just freezing," Steve points out. "Losing a layer would have been stupid."

"But maybe more fun," Tony says, wiggling his ass. 

Steve rolls his eyes. "I don't know if you've noticed, but your suit made funny unexpected crunching noises and dumped us in a Canadian Territory that apparently happened while I was sleeping. It's cold and we're stuck, and we have no idea whether JARVIS knows where you are."

"Probably he does. Probably-ish. Or at least, reasonable trajectory. Plus, emergency beacon. That can't have failed too, can it?"

"Not my area. Wouldn't know. In any case, convenient porn is not among the things we should be doing with our time."

"Says you, as you snuggle me into this emergency blanket thing--where do you _carry_ this, anyway?"

"Pocket, just like Bruce's pants. And it's a good use of time if it means we don't die of freezing."

"Like you would."

"Like I haven't thought of that totally exciting possibility, thanks."

"Oh, right. I can see how that would seem kind of creepy, especially since in that scenario I probably _would_... right. Uh, okay. So now we're getting kind of toasty, so I should maybe have a look at the black box, see if I can get it to speak to me."

"Five more minutes, Stark, and then we'll get up for _five minutes_ and see what you can see. And then more staying warm while you think about the solution. Right?"

Tony sighs. "Fine."

* * *

+1. Steve wakes up slowly, confused. Almost as confused as when he woke in the fake room, with the fake radio, with--his eyes open fast and he tries to get up.

"Don't," says Clint. "Shh." He doesn't hold Steve down, just slows him a little, and Steve feels his pulse pounding, but it's already slowing, calming. Clint's curled in against his side in the uncomfortable chairs, one hand on Steve's chest patting or almost stroking, like he's calming a little kid.

It's basically working.

Thor leans in from the other side. "Have you rested, Brother?" His arm is resting against Steve's shoulders and his hair is ridiculous; Steve feels a little bad about enjoying the fact that apparently even gods have what Tony calls 'bed-head.' Even in a chair.

Steve nods and swallows to wet his mouth a little. "We haven't heard anything?"

Tasha is on the floor, leaning her head against his knee. She lifts her face toward him. "We'd have woken you, of course. But even you cannot remain effective so many days, and worry all the while."

"Did you drug me?" Steve asks. He feels like something must have helped him sleep, even for a little while, because she's right; it's been days, but not-sleeping had felt like the right call.

Tony shows up out of nowhere and hands him a cup of coffee. "Yeah, because I've totally been working on some Cap-effective knockout pills in my spare time."

"No," Thor says at the same time. He waits for Tony to stop speaking, then adds, "We merely cuddled you."

"You cuddled me."

"You respond very well to touch," Tasha informs him.

"And you'd have done the same for us," Clint says. "I'm pretty sure you _have_ done the same for all of us, one time or another."

"Where's Bruce?" Steve asks.

"Went to see if he could get a gander at the latest chart," Tony says. "Just because there's no apparent change doesn't mean there's not useful data there." He takes a long drink of his own coffee and adds, "But even if there's no change to the data, it's going to be fine, Cap. He pulled through before, you know, with the--" He makes a stabbing motion, and shrugs at Clint. "So, he's tough, and he'll pull through again. If anything, with you guys _finally_ getting all cozy and all, well. Which took you long enough, by the way. Anyway. He has even more reason to get better than he did last time, and he's going to be _fine_."

Steve nods. "I'm trying to believe that."

"You should." Bruce pokes his head around the corner. "And you should go have a look yourself. Still not awake, but he looks less like shit, and also you should go talk to him anyway. Now that you're not a raving maniac."

"Says our resident rave machine," Tony says. Bruce flips him off and grins. 

"Come on," Clint says, uncurling and standing. "We'll go with you."

Steve untangles himself from Thor and Tasha, and lets Clint offer him a hand up as everyone forms up around him. "You will?"

"Stupid question," Tony says. Natasha just looks at him.

Clint prods at him with an elbow. "You came with me, Cap. Plus, _team_. Of course we will."

Steve stands for a moment and considers them all, then nods. "Thanks."


End file.
